The Northwestern Libraries are pleased to announce the receipt of the archive of historian Pier Larson (1961-2020), a renowned scholar of African history. The papers gathered by Larson over the course of his extensive career will reside in the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies.
Larson, a Johns Hopkins University professor since 1998, specialized in the history of Madagascar and the Indian Ocean islands, focusing on 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. His teaching and research centered on the history of East and southern Africa, Madagascar, and the Francophone islands of the Western Indian Ocean, slavery, literacy, religion, and the history of the French empire.
Larson earned his undergraduate history degree at the University of Minnesota in 1985, and his master’s and PhD in African history at the University of Wisconsin in 1987 and 1992, respectively. Larson’s work illuminated historical connections between Madagascar, the eastern coast of Africa, South Asia, and the islands of Mauritius and Reunion, helping to make Indian Ocean communities a more integral part of the broader study of Africa.
Esmeralda Kale, the George and Mary LeCron Foster Curator of the Herskovits Library believes the archive is invaluable to the contemporary study of Africa. “Fluent in French and Malagasy, Dr. Larson crisscrossed the globe for decades, undertaking archival research in a methodical manner, inventorying the archives he was studying, and transcribing tens of thousands of documents. His inventories, photographs, and transcriptions are therefore an extremely rich resource for anyone doing research in this area,” she said.
The voluminous archive includes The Larson Fieldwork Collection of oral interviews, video recordings of performed music and cultural gatherings, transcripts, and photographs (materials that supported his 1992 dissertation and his first book, History and Memory in the Age of Enslavement: Becoming Merina In Highland Madagascar, 1770-1822); detailed inventories of the archives where Larson worked for decades along with extensive transcriptions of archival documents; research notes; lecture notes and class syllabi; three unpublished manuscripts he was working on at the time of his death: Island of Letters: Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic in an African Kingdom, The Corrollers: An Indian Ocean Family, and the third a series of articles that were the beginnings of a book on the 17th century French colony of Fort Dauphin in Madagascar (One of these articles, Play and Possession: Sex, Marriage, and Household at Fort Dauphin (Madagascar), c. 1660s will appear in the Journal of Southern African Studies, vol.48, no. 5, in November 2022). Larson’s files of photographs include primary source materials (in some cases the only digital copies), art, topography, landscapes, historic structures, and people, all carefully cataloged.
“Dr. Larson was a pioneering scholar and a master archivist,” said Sara Berry, a Johns Hopkins University professor emeritus in the Department of History. “Having access to his enormous collection of primary sources as well as the manuscripts he was working on at the time of his death will allow scholars to carry forward the study of a region whose complex interlinkages are only beginning to be understood.”
Larson had worked extensively with the Herskovits Library over the course of his career, making him quite familiar with its holdings and its place in the scholarship of the field. Larson’s wife, Michelle Boardman, believed this made the Herskovits the logical home of his papers.
“The Herskovits is one of the most comprehensive collections of African material worldwide and is a place Pier knew well,” she said. “His work can now be easily found and used by the widest possible scholarly community.”
Boardman, along with Norge Larson and Arlene Libby, Pier’s brother and sister-in-law, have provided a generous gift to process the collection and make the material accessible in the near future.
“We know this is an archive that will be in demand, so we are grateful for the support to process it quickly,” Kale said. “We thank his family for helping us preserve Dr. Larson’s legacy and making it accessible to the generations of scholars who will get years of use from these materials.”
For more information contact the Herskovits library at (847) 467-3084 or africana@northwestern.edu.